Page 100 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

ETHNOGRAPHY 89

of what is and what is not rewarding in the spectrum of Scout activities. What set
out to be a creative activity thus bore little relation to the concerns of the boys,
not because it was distasteful but because it lacked an immediate appeal to the
imagination.
After dinner we went back to the project to fasten the ‘engine’ of the balloon,
a rag soaked in methylated spirit and attached to a cross piece. The whole
balloon had to be examined for tears and loose edges so that patches could be
applied. Meanwhile, we began to inflate our balloon by placing under the air
hole a lighted gas stove. It was at this point that the project came to life for me
(and evidently for others) as the various troops made their final preparations
before the launching. Instead of a passive pattern of paper shapes, the object had
now become rounded and voluminous, about 1.5 metres high and tricked out in
the troop’s distinctive colours. The whole activity thus became implicitly
redefined in terms of the cultural connotations of flight. Here, then, we were
moving into the mythical world, novel, spectacular, which was suggested by the
results of a creative activity in the distinctly improvisatory Scouting tradition.
The members of the troops concerned gathered in the main field at Green Farm
as dusk approached, and the leaders of the boys took it upon themselves to
inflate their balloons, swelling them out with the hot air of gas stoves and finally
launching them into the air, the smoke from the ignited rag at the bottom
dwindling up into the balloons as they rose, one after the other, into the still air.
At this stage there was a great deal of enthusiasm among the boys—precisely, it
seemed to me, through the recognition of the mythos of flight represented by
these collective objects. It was thus in the moment of consumption that the
activity gained a meaning it had not possessed previously; it was then that the
imagination was seized, rather than in the routines of production. In most cases
the balloons floated for a couple of hundred metres over fields and fences
pursued by hordes of shouting boys, were retrieved and, thanks to the
exceptionally favourable weather conditions, relaunched as twilight turned into
darkness. (I should add that this experience seemed to fire a certain enthusiasm
for the project later on; for instance, at summer camp the older lads who had
been at Green Farm made a balloon that, owing to weather conditions,
unfortunately keeled over and caught fire.)
The conditions for a successful creative activity were thus founded in the
moment of consumption, which thereafter prompted future production. The
project was successful, but only in that it had a spectacular dénouement; its
beginnings were distinctly unpromising and were quickly defined as a chore. We
can learn from the reception of this activity something about the methods of
Scouting and their relevance to its subjects. First, labour in Scouting operates
necessarily by means of improvised ‘pioneer’ materials—bits of paper and wood
in our case. Second, it posits creativity in a form of labour and enjoyment in an
immediate consumption of the product of labour, but in practice the ‘moment of
production’, even in such a simple pattern of creative activity, remains somewhat
separate and apart from the ‘moment of consumption’ unless the producers